"If We Must Die" by Claudy Mckay
If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Analysis of Poem
If We Must Die focuses on expressing the thoughts and nature of a black slave by giving experiences and insight from the point of a one. It talks about how if they must die, they don’t want it to be a waste of their life by running away, they want to fight back and be noble and brave. The author’s belief is to live an honest life as a slave because in death the enslavers, the ones who killed blacks for fun would be the ones serving the slaves. If he is to die, being hunted down, he thinks they should face their fate and for all the damage he takes, he can take a bad person down with him by fighting back. This can be proven by him saying things such as, “Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack” and “And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!” The true moral lies in honesty and nobility to oneself and being a true man and in time because whether life or death, the blacks would be the ones that will rise up and come on top.
Bio of Author
Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American poet and writer born in 1889 in western Jamaica. He traveled to the USA in 1912, attending Tuskegee Institute for just a few months before leaving to study agriculture at Kansas State University. By the time he was out of college, the Harlem Renaissance was just starting to happen, a time when blacks in Harlem, NY wrote about the cultural, economic, and political differences directed to their culture. McKay took advantage of this time and published two sonnets, “Invocation” and “The Harlem Dancer,” which would go on to be two of his most famous sonnets. He wrote more and more poems and due to his success he ended up writing an entire book called, “Complete Poems” featuring over three-hundred poems, nearly one-hundred of which were new to just that book. After gaining an interest in Communism in his twenties, McKay traveled to Russia and France where he met Edna St. Vincent Millay and Lewis Sinclair, two famous American poets and short-story writers. Many years passed and he gave up on communism, moving back to Harlem, New York and converting to Catholicism after being enlightened by the city’s spiritual and political leaders. Due to his strong success in poetry, he gained deep respect by many african-americans, including Langston Hughes who would grow up to be a successful poet like McKay.